Nigeria has held elections that are so openly fraudulent as to have caused considerable embarrassment to supporters of the bourgeois-democratic process as the answer to every problem.

Observing an election organised in Nigeria is like looking at a clock in a transparent case – one can see only too clearly how bourgeois elections are fixed in oppressed countries in order to bring about the result desired by the dominant imperialist interests in each of those countries. Ballot boxes are stuffed, or ‘disappear’, voters are intimidated by gangs of thugs, candidates are disqualified by the dozen, and the winner takes all.

Notwithstanding the widespread fraud, there has been almost nothing by way of denunciation or outrage emanating from our ‘free’ and democratic press – after all, the election has been won by the ruling PDP, a satisfactorily comprador party, and therefore the result must be all right, notwithstanding small ‘irregularities’!